Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Here are the Agile Product Management & Software Engineering Excellence articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients in 2017. Look for these lists from each of our four practice areas, and rediscover Cutter's most intriguing articles of the year!

The change to an Agile mode of operation demands a manager who is able to act as a leader with an emphasis on inspiration, motivation, learning, and giving responsibility and trust.

Cloud has paved the way for the rapid growth of the IoT, but with such growth, businesses need faster and more efficient solutions than ever, since information that is as new as one day old can lose value. Compa­nies are turning to fog computing for higher efficiency, better security, faster decision-making processes, and lowered operating costs.

Having a market structure that supports and encourages diversification of risks is key to avoiding systemic risks not only to national economies, but to the global economy as well.

This Executive Update examines the use cases surveyed organizations indicate as being most viable for applying blockchain technology.

Giti Javidi, Ehsan Sheybani, and Lila Rajabion present a convincing argument for redistributing the cloud. They suggest that the cost and time associated with transmitting data to the cloud, processing it there, and returning the results back to the IoT devices are critical. Fog computing both enhances and complements the cloud by bringing the processing closer to a cluster of IoT devices, resulting in faster analytics.

Clustering large amounts of unstructured data into relatively smaller chunks based on some similarity is at the crux of unstructured data analytics. Here’s where “swarm intelligence” can play a role — an application that drives neural networks for clustering unstructured data. The authors offer an excellent example of swarm intelligence via a model that learns to classify Web documents. We can easily apply this same algorithm to business, medicine, defense, and supply chains, to name a few other areas.

The authors focus on the challenges of security in the Agile deployment of big data applications in the cloud. Security issues can make or break the deployment of otherwise complete solutions in the cloud. The authors begin by introduc­ing the topic of “micro­segmentation” — which allows “public cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers to offer software-centric or software-only solutions.” The value of this discussion to business lies in the opportunity to quickly deploy secure models for end-user consumption.